Tagged: city
Sunshine and Coffee
05 Feb 2021
I did try to knock off one tiny bit of Baltic Wharf I've missed, but I don't know yet if I succeeded. Mostly this trip was just a reason to get out of the house and into the sunshine while it lasted. Spring is in the air.
A wander to knock off a couple of bits around Clifton Park that I'd missed out on previous excursions. This one took in the drinking fountain near Sion Hill and explained a little of how the Seven Years War, which ended in 1763, still has some history on display near Manilla Road.
It makes a lot more sense when you realise that there's a bit missing. On this page you can see a drawing of the original with an ornate centrepiece where "a central urn with four consoles offered drinking cups suspended by chains", and there's also a photo from c. 1980 of a replacement "font" in place, rather more utilitarian, but still at least raising the water from down here up to a bowl rather closer to drinking level!
I'm sure I've written in more depth on this obelisk to William Pitt the Elder, which used to stand in the grounds of Manilla Hall, which itself used to stand just off to the right of this photo, in a space itself commemorated by the name of Manilla Road.
This sarcophagus surmounted by an urn is a 1767 memorial to the dead of the Seven Years War.
Leading off the far side of the roundabout in the background is Manilla Road, former site of Manilla Hall, built by General Sir William Draper, whose victories include capture of Manilla City in 1762. This cenotaph and the adjoining obelisk to Pitt used to stand in the grounds there.
I'm starting to get the hang of which is which. These are Ionic. You can tell by the volutes.
From the Clifton and Hotwells Character Appraisal:
Vyvyan Terrace (1832 -1846) by Richard Shackleton Pope, was named after the Tory MP Sir Richard Vyvyan, who won the 1832 parliamentary election by defying the Reform Bill & bribing 1200 voters.
Nos. 14-17 were the first to be built and stood alone for many years before the rest of the terrace was completed. The group sits on a privately owned raised pavement and railings were replaced as a community project in the late 1970s.
Vyvyan House is pretty grand.
I imagine it was built for some branch of this Vyvyan family, but I'm only guessing. One of them was MP for Bristol, though...
Ah! Interestingly, the Clifton and Hotwells Character Appraisal says of neighbouring Vyvyan Terrace:
Vyvyan Terrace (1832 -1846) by Richard Shackleton Pope, was named after the Tory MP Sir Richard Vyvyan, who won the 1832 parliamentary election by defying the Reform Bill & bribing 1200 voters.
(Photographic Lack of) Worcester Terrace
09 Feb 2021
A nice walk, but something of a failure, photographically. I went to knock Worcester Terrace off my list, a not dissimilar terrace to Vyvyan Terrace, but one street further away from me. Like yesterday, it was very chilly but this time I went prepared with an extra layer and a winter coat. I think this may have been my downfall, as it may have been the X100T's control wheel brushing against the coat that put it in aperture priority mode at f/16, which I didn't notice at the time, and made most of my photos a little too blurry to use. Apparently in this mode, the X100 doesn't bump up the ISO if it can tell things might be a little too wobbly. Ah well.
So, a nice enough walk, and technically I did Worcester Terrace, but if you didn't take a photograph, were you really there? I'll have to go back...
Can't find out much about the history of the name, as there's pages of Google results in the way about a World of Warcraft zone with the same name!
I don't know much about architecture, but I understand that if your porch has a dormer, you're probably quite well-off.
The posh place on the end of Worcester Terrace seems to be the only bit with Ionic columns. They're all over Vyvyan Terrace, behind.
Another day, another coffee. I think I may have knocked a tiny footpath in Baltic Wharf from my list of leftover paths in the area, but mostly this walk was about getting out into the crisp February cold and enjoying the walk. On the way I posted a letter at 13 Dowry Parade (home of a surgeon called Willam Falls back 1830, according to Pigot's Directory of Gloucestershire...) and pondered the strange duality of Dowry Parade and Hotwell Road, then wandered through the Dowry Parade end of Cumberland Piazza, enjoying the clean lines of the glyph graff, before taking the causeway route past a Cumberland Basin empty of water but full of seagulls, to make my way south of the harbour.
There was a smell of unpleasant fire—more the acrid, plasticky smell of some kind of accidental fire than the pleasant harbourside aroma of wood-burners on narrowboats. I think the source was on the south side of the river, but I didn't have the time to find out.
There was, coincidentally, a burning BMW outside the Counts Louse today, apparently, but that would have been too far away to smell.
Brief Jaunt to the not-so-Hot Well
13 Feb 2021
It's been very cold the last few days, so seeing as it was low tide at a convenient afternoon hour, I just wandered out to see if I could see the hot well steaming. I've been told that you sometimes can, on a cold day, but today, as with every other day I've tried, there was nothing in evidence.
It may be that the emergent spring has already filtered through too much cold river silt by the time it hits the surface these days, or even that it's running cooler than it used to. But perhaps I've just been unlucky.
According to the estate agent's brochure I just found, including the cellars this place has 567 square metres of space to offer. There was not a price in the brochure, but back in 2017 they were asking for "offers over £1,995,000".
Clifton Village, including Oxford Place
15 Feb 2021
I've noticed Oxford Place as a tiny little side/back road I've overlooked on my wanders a few times. Today I decided to pop down and have a look, as well as taking a few general snaps of Princess Victoria Street, which I thought deserved more pictures, as it's basically my closest decent shops, and in the Beforetimes I'd visit the Co-Op up there all the time, as well as the cafes (you'll be missed, Clifton Village branch of Boston Tea Party, recently closed in favour of Eat a Pitta.)
I'm definitely becoming more familiar with the area through the One Mile Matt jaunts and associated reading. Today I didn't just think, "oh, I'll head home down that weird alleyway with the electrical substation in it"—no, I thought, "I'll head home down Hanover Lane", because I actually knew its name. And on the way back from there I nodded sagely to myself as I passed St Vincent's Road, knowing now which St Vincent it's likely to be (St Vincent of Saragossa) and also eyed up the modern flats on Clifton Vale and wondered if they might have been built on the site of the former Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens... I don't know all the answers, but at least I have some idea of the historical questions I'm interested in.
There's no reason to enter Oxford Place unless you live there or are visiting someone who does, so I've never been down here before.
Disappointingly, they make jewellery, not dragons. Still, I've heard they do it very well.
Last time I was in I saw a jazz gig in the back room. It wasn't entirely my cup of tea, but hey, it was better than being cooped up at home for a year, so Yay! for the Beforetimes.
Not sure why they're digging up the road this time. Last time there was a burst water main at the corner of Merchants Road.
I've barely ever noticed the two modern blocks there. They blend in rather well with the Georgian stuff.
Little Victories
16 Feb 2021
There's a dearth of my favourite coffee places on a Monday and Tuesday at the moment. Both Twelve and Imagine That are closed on Monday and Tuesday, and Rich from Hopper Coffee doesn't seem to have come back from Christmas break. Today I pushed on a bit further than normal around the harbour and got to Little Victories, the always-reliable sister cafe to Small Street Espresso, based at Wapping Wharf. Along the way I saw graffiti, my second reference to one of Bristol's twin cities in two days, and a rather sleek little boat outside Rolt's Boat Yard.
Meridian
17 Feb 2021
The long road between Clifton Road and Park Place—the little triangle of grass in front of the Pro-Cathedral, which also houses Quinton House pub, the Park Launderette and Mr Swantons Barbers—is one I've travelled a lot, as it's a nice route between my place and the top of Park Street, especially Ocado. It has many names along the way, even though it feels like just one continuous road. It's York Place, Tottenham Place, Meridian Place and Bruton Place before it finally spits you out onto Park Place.
It was Meridian Place I was interested in today, as I wanted to explore the set of steps that lead down from it in the direction of Jacobs Wells Road. Turns out they lead to Meridian Vale and Meridian Mews, and come out between the Strangers Burial Ground and the Eldon House, opposite the entrance to Bellevue Terrace. I liked the little terrace on Meridian Vale, though they probably don't get a lot of light in the front windows, what with Meridian Place and Tottenham Place towering above them.
On the way back home I popped into the little lane behind Regent Street that houses the Chesterfield Hospital, as I realised I'd neglected that up until now. It was... unexciting.
Considerate. I wonder how often this little cut-through is used? I suppose it's a very quick way of getting to The Eldon House from up here, at least.
The extra geometric shapes laid out on the lawn of the private garden added to the general polygonality of the area.
Very Brief Hotwells Wander
18 Feb 2021
Really just a quick loop of the Cumberland Basin. I was going to go further, and it was a nice early spring day, but I hadn't slept that well and I wasn't really in the mood. Ah well. Not every walk is great. At least I got out of the house for a bit.
I've not been able to find much detail on this one. It's marked as a public house for a long stretch in the old maps, and on the 1879-1888 town plans named as the York Hotel. I've also seen the names York House Hotel and New Inn associated with it.
161 is used by Anti Fascist Action as a code for AFA (A=1, F=6, by order of the alphabet), sometimes used in 161>88[3] (88 is code for Heil Hitler among neo-nazis, as H=8)
I went to get my first dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine today. Handily, the vaccination centre was Clifton College Prep School in Northcote road, next to Bristol Zoo, a road that's just within my 1-mile range that I hadn't visited before.
I parked up near Ladies Mile and tried to find a few of the tracks marked on the map I'm using, but couldn't see most of them. Whether that's just because they've disappeared over time, or with the recent lack of use or waterlogging from the 24 hours of rain we just had, I'm not sure. It was a pretty fruitless search, anyway.
The vaccine shot was virtually the same setup as when I got my winter flu jab back in November, except for the venue. I snapped a couple of pictures of the school while I was there, but I was in and out in five minutes, and you probably don't want to linger around a vaccination centre, I suppose.
Instead I wandered around the compact block of the Zoo, now sadly scheduled for closure. By coincidence I finished E H Young's Chatterton Square this morning: set in Clifton (fictionalised as "Upper Radstowe") near the Zoo, the occasional roars of the lions that can be heard by the residents of the square (Canynge Square in real life) form part of the background of the novel. The book's set in 1938 (though written and published post-war, in 1947). It seems a shame that the incongruous sounds of the jungle will no longer be heard from 2022. All I heard today were some exotic birds and, I think, some monkeys.
I was told not to drive for fifteen minutes following the jab, so I wandered out of my area up to the top of Upper Belgrave Road to check out an interesting factoid I'd read while looking into the history of the reservoir at Oakfield Road, that the site of 46 Upper Belgrave Road was a bungalow, shorter than the adjacent houses, and owned by Bristol Water, kept specifically low so that the pump man at Oakfield Road could see the standpipe for the Downs Reservoir (presumably by or on the water tower on the Downs) and turn the pump off when it started overflowing. Sadly I couldn't confirm it. There is one particularly low house on that stretch, but it's number 44, and though small, it's two-storey, not a bungalow, so nothing really seems to quite fit in with the tale.
I'm writing this about nine hours after getting the jab, by the way, and haven't noticed any ill effects at all. My arm's not even sore, as it usually would be after the normal flu jab. In twelve weeks I should get an appointment to get the second dose.
This is a nursery, next to the Prep School, next to Clifton College. You could get all your educational needs for a very long time seen to in a very short radius around here.
This is the building where I had the first AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine shot.
Not sure whose coat of arms it is; it's not Clifton College's. The motto, Nemo Sibi Nascitur, means "No one is born unto himself". This grand building isn't actually listed—well, it's on the local list, but that doesn't tell you much—and I can't see much in the way of information about it from a quick squint around the web.
As with most zoos, Bristol zoo has focused more and more on conservation efforts over the years, rather than the earlier ideal of nicking anything interesting they could lay their hands on around the world and charging money for children to ride on it.
I remember being rather taken with the elephant that was just wandering around the grounds at large (presumably accompanied, but I don't recall that bit) on my first visit. That must've been a while ago because Wendy died in 2002.